The purpose of this research is to investigate the present meaning and actuallity of metaphor from the point of view of several modern new theories about it, for example Derrida's thoery of difference and repetition, autopoiecis-theory, Luhmann's system theory, information processing theory, cognitive psychology (Lakoff) etc. which have lately attracted considerable attention.Since 1994 we have been trying to formulate the significance of theories about metaphor, and clarified elementar points and rhetotical position. As the next stage of our studies, we attempted to examine in this research how "differences and schifis" work in languages, because a phenomenon of "gaps" is regarded as the first fundamental prerequisite for creating a metaphor, not only in classical theories of metaphor from Aristoteles to Ricoeul, but also in new thoughts on metaphor.First we reexamined Benjamin's famous ideas about allegory to which gaps are essential, and then two theories that are based on ironical
… Moreshift-mechanism which covers our life with virtual falses and images as a result of the absense of connections with referents; the notion of the shift-transposition in languages ( Aitchison) and information processing theory. After that we investigated shifts for metaphor from a point of view of the cognitive psychology (Lakoff) which reduces every cultural level and activity that slides a fundamental level of senses, namely gaps and shifts, to the physical dimension. System theory also regards the shift and gap by self-reflection as one of the most important conditions for communication and creating meaning and metaphor.We came to the conclusion that shift involves not only negative characters, but also positive various potentiality and are among the most necessary condition for language and thinking. It is also true of metaphor that is a part of the language and makes the best of shifts in order to produce of view and meanings. Consequently, in our next subject we would like to take a mechanism of combinations of two different elements, a generation-system from shifts, in the case of metaphor into consideration. Less